I can certainly see why he runs as a Republican- the current fight is between the libertarian side of the party and the remnants of the Moral Majority faction and the establishment power base. The unfortunate fact is that libertarian party candidates don't get elected to the presidency and the senate, republicans do. He therefore can accomplish a lot more by getting elected as a Republican than he could by losing a Libertarian. President Reagan largely redefined the republican party in his own image, so there's no reason Rand Paul couldn't do the same.

Of course Reagan also developed an alliance with the Moral Majority crowd in order to get elected, and that alliance affected the party platform. Moral Majority officially shut down many years ago and people are fed up with the establishment power base, so the party is ripe to be redefined again.

A single senator can filibuster a bill. Senator Rand Paul said he'd prevent it from passing before the Senate went on break, and he did so. Rand Paul is now saying he'll make sure it isn't passed on Sunday, and there's every reason to think he'll do so again, just like he did before.

I'll be considering him carefully when I choose my presidential vote.

20 Mbps isn't broadband, under the administrations new rules. The subsidies start at 25 Mbps in rural areas and the plan is to require at least 100 Mbps. Can you get 100 Mbps for $20? Probably not, but if you you slacked off in high school, you'll be able to get it and have someone else pay for it now.

> And if broadband allows one in a thousand to take online classes

Let's takea look at your "if". As you recall, the FCC also just redefined the word "broadband" to mean service which costs $85-$105 per month. So about $1,000 per year, per person. You say "if one in a thousand" recipients, so 1,000 recipients at $1,000 per year each is $1 million per year. You think it's a good deal if you spend $1 million per year to encourage one guy to do online classes. Note that doesn't actually pay for the classes, you just hope that with faster internet he might take classes.

Did it occur to you that it would be cheaper to pay full tuition for TEN people who actually worked hard at school, proving that they want to be educated and they'll do the work in college? Certainly it didn't occur to you that the million bucks you want to spend is coming from my family, whre I AM struggling to pay for my own college while supporting the family, while my wife waits for her turn to go to school when we can afford it. Then we hope to save up for our daughter to go to school. No, you wouldn't want us, who work to pay for school, to be able to finish college. Much better that you take my paycheck and use it to pay for someone who doesn't work to stream multiple Netflix shows rather than the one they're watching right now.

Damn you guys are bad at math and logic. Friggin think about the costs and consequences of your decisions omce in a while.

According to half the people here on Slashdot, the solution to any and all problems is to have another federal government department do _something_. Do what? Anything, really, as long as they do _something_. These guys are their great hope, people so dense they mail out live anthrax all over the place. Good luck getting them to solve all of your problems.

> You maximize profit. the amount of tax you pay on profit is irrelevant to the process of maximizing it.

No, I maximize my take-home, also called risk-adjusted net returns. Along with any other values you have such as environmental concerns. Gross profit (what is taxed) doesn't matter. What matters is how much ends up in your pocket. Here are some rough numbers from the choice I actually had to make three years ago. I could either:

A) Continue to run a business with the following numbers:
Revenue $200,000
Payroll expense $100,000
Tax and compliance $40,000
Other expense $20,000
Net take-home $40,000

B) I could take a job working for the government with these numbers:
Salary $52,0000
Benefits $13,0000
Tax $10,0000
Take-home $55,000

Note that "before-tax gross profit" doesn't appear in the calculations, because it doesn't matter. What matters is how much goes in my pocket after all expenses, including payroll with payroll taxes, direct taxes, compliance cost, everything. You'll note that the number that matters, net take-home, was higher if I laid off my two employees and took a government job. So that's what I did.

You may also note that if the taxes and compliance costs were half as much, the net take-home would have been better by keeping the business open and my employees would still have jobs.

We already know this is designed to be used in dishwashers and other appliances. Google doesn't know what else it'll be used for. It IS kind of silly to pick such a well-known trademark when the POTENTIAL for a possible conflict is so obvious. Brillon, Billo, or Belo wouldn't have the same problem. One of those could be a trademark, but being far less well-known, it would be a much smaller problem.

I recall in the early days when Apple (computer) chose their name, they thought there would be no problem with Apple (records) because they weren't in the music business. Then, iPod suddenly accounted for 90% of their revenue. Oops.

> If you use those on an Arduino (I am) I guess it lacks the juice to do proper encryption?

Arduino can do RSA and others. Good algorithms are generally quite feasible on very small devices, at least for small amounts of data. Which goes to show 32MB is rather high for current IoT devices.

  However, there is a $9 board about to be released which has 512MB and runs Linux. So while it's not NECESSARY to have megabytes of RAM in a "thing", it's not all that expensive either. The price per byte keeps going down, so in five years an MCU with 64 MB may cost the same as an MCU with 1MB does today.

Texas republican senator Ted Cruz is leading the fight to do the right thing, to protect our Constitutional rights. Our other senator, John Cornyn, wants to renew the Patriot Act in full. Here is my letter to Cornyn.

As a career security professional, I implore you to reconsider your position regarding the Patriot Act, the USA Freedom Act, and the Fourth Amendment.

  For twenty years I have worked to keep protect American citizens, interests, and our way of life. Currently, I am employed at TEEX, where I work with our National Emergency Response And Rescue Training Center, assist in homeland security training, and support our role as a founding member of the National Cybersecurity Preparedness Consortium. I do this work in order to protect the American way of life, that we might be the beacon of freedom that founders envisioned. The antithesis of this would be that the United States would be taken over by those who would subjugate the citizens. Our role, sir, is to, protect Americans from not one specific foreign threat, but from any and all who would threaten our Constitutional liberties. Your current position, senator, places you on the wrong side of this fight. Please reconsider whether you wish to be the force fighting against the Constitution, against the fourth amendment, and against the American way of life. We work today, and will work at election time, to realize the vision of American as the brightest beacon of freedom and liberty in the world.

It's too bad that when you have 10+ years of experience and your cover letter mentions that they are already using patches you've sent them over the years, they completely ignore you.

One issue I fixed for them was particularly "entertaining". I sent them a note mentioning a problem. They replied saying basically "yes, we are aware of that problem, but we're not sure how to fix it, so it may take quite a while". A few minutes I replied back with a fixed version of their file, which I was using for our customers. Soon after they released an update with my fix.

So it took me a few minutes to solve a CPanel bug that they couldn't figure out. Then I send them a resume and crickets.

The only code guaranteed to be secure is code you didn't include. If typical code, Windows for example, has one serious bug per 5,000 lines of code, this should have approximately 0 serious bugs.

Had I not already posted in th

Well, we know that a parachute is so simple that George Bush can use it. If their design is even simpler, yet they keep screwing it up ...

There IS a reason they're trying to balance that big rocket from the bottom, but simple isn't it.

The harder brainteaser they SHOULD ask:

A large, cylindrical object is falling. You want it to land upright, with the correct end down. Which of these strategies do you choose:
a) Attach a parachute to the nose and let basic physics work.
b) Try to balance it atop rocket engines firing from the bottom.